Excerpt of Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr
(Page 4 of 8)
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“Yes,” Mom said, smiling back, drawing a perfectly but modestly
home-manicured finger through a piece of hair that had fallen
across her face. “It does wonders with grocery lists.” But when the
guy was gone, Mom said to me, “I guess we’re not supposed to live
in the twenty-first century,” and tucked the phone into her purse,
out of sight.
There’s a lot of stuff like that we deal with. Those are just
examples.
Now Dad pulls the car right in front of Main Street Hardware,
and as he turns off the engine there’s a little rattle coming from
under the hood. I look at him. He’s pretending not to hear it. After
Mom’s accident, and every thing else, the last thing we need is car
trouble.
The bells on the door of the hardware store jingle as we go in.
A wave of air-conditioned air feels too cold at first, raising goose
bumps on my arms, but then it’s like heaven.
“Charlie, hey.” Cal Stewart, who owns and single-handedly runs
the hardware store, greets us. Or I should say he greets my dad and
nods politely at me. “What can I do for you?” I like Cal, even
though he never remembers my name. He’s got woolly dark hair
that’s just starting to go a little gray, and wire-rim glasses that
make him look smarter than most people in Pineview, and he’s a
lot nicer than the old couple he bought the store from a few
years ago.
Dad and Cal discuss the ceiling fan issue, and I take advantage
of the chance to walk the aisles of the store, running my hand over
the different-size chains that hang from spools, looking into bins
of glittering loose nails in every size, examining a dozen kinds of
spackles and glues. There’s something to make or fix or connect
every thing.
When he’s done talking to my dad, Cal walks by the other end
of the aisle and catches sight of me.
“Can I help you find something?”
“I’m thinking about doing something different in our backyard.”
“Let’s go to the outdoor section. Near the front.”
My dad is up front, too, talking on his cell, something about the
music for tomorrow’s service.
Cal asks me, “So you want to do something different. Different
how?”
“It’s so hot,” I say. “Everything’s kind of . . . dying.”
He leads me to a spinning wire rack of thin gardening books,
many of them dusty and with pages that are starting to yellow
from the sun. “Here’s one on desert gardening. Technically, Pineview
is high desert and not true desert, but it’s got a lot of info on
plants that don’t need much water.”
“Xeriscaping.”
“Right.” He hands me the book. “Is this for 4-H?”
“No,” I say, surprised that he remembers. “Just for my house.”
The last time I came here was to get wooden dowels. I dropped
out of 4-H before I finished that project, which was supposed to be
me and Vanessa teaching crafts at the Dillon’s Bluff Senior Center,
but my mom wasn’t doing so well the day she’d promised to
drive us to do the setup, and my dad was busy with church, and
instead of telling the truth I told Vanessa that I’d given my mom
the wrong date and Vanessa got mad and I dropped out rather than
let her down again. Anyway.
“You’ll probably need some of this,” Cal says, leading me through
the store to a pile of black plastic sheeting.
“What for?”
“To smother those water-greedy plants you’re trying to replace.”
He hands me a bulky, folded armload of it.
“Ready, Sam?” my dad asks, eyeing what I’ve got and, I’m sure,
calculating the price.
I nod. Cal rings us up and Dad pays with a credit card. We
both exhale and try not to look too surprised when it goes
through.
Excerpted from Once Was Lost
by Sara Zarr. Copyright © 2009 by Sara Zarr.
Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
